The Philadelphia Story

Philip Barry's witty comedy of manners (1940) about a spoiled rich girl (Katharine Hepburn) who longs for some genuine romance. George Cukor gives it the royal treatment with a splendid supporting cast: Cary Grant as Hepburn's sardonic ex-husband, James Stewart as the streetwise but romantically timorous reporter who falls in love with her, and Ruth Hussey as Stewart's philosophical partner. It checks in a little below Cukor's 1938 Grant-Hepburn-Barry outing, Holiday, a more tender and less cluttered variation on the same theme, but second best in this league is still something special. With John Howard, Roland Young, and Henry Daniell.
ByDave Kehr